Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.
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A pool is, for many of us in the West, a symbol not of affluence but of order, of control over the uncontrollable. A pool is water, made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the western eye.
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The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.
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We were that generation called silent, but we were silent neither, as some thought, because we shared the period's official optimism nor, as others thought, because we feared its official repression. We were silent because the exhilaration of social action seemed to many of us just one more way of escaping the personal, of masking for a while that dread of the meaningless which was man's fate.
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When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble.
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Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power.
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Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power.
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California: The west coast of Iowa.
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Character - the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life - is the source from which self respect springs.
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To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth... is potentially to have everything...
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Writers are always selling somebody out.
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I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
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The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
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